The Degradation Ceremony

In Gibson's dystopia, the human "meat puppet", as Case so eloquently
described the body in Neuromancer, is infinitely malleable for
anyone with a large enough pocketbook. Society has progressed so
far that the realm of fashion extends into altering the entirety of
one's body. During Mona Lisa Overdrive one of the main
characters,
Mona, awakes to find herself transformed:

Opened her eyes but there was only the ceiling, white squares of
acoustic tile. Turned her head to the left. White plastic wall with one
of those fake windows, hi-rez animation of a beach with palm trees and
waves; watch the water long enough and you'd see the same waves rolling
in, looped forever. Except the thing was broken or worn out, a kind of
hesitation in the waves, and the red of the sunset pulsed like a bad
fluorescent tube. Try right. Turning again, feeling the sweaty paper
cover on the hard foam pillow against her neckÉ

And the face with bruised eyes looking at her from the other bed, nose
braces with clear plastic and micropore tape, some kind of brown jelly
stuff smeared back across the cheekbones . . .

Angie. It was Angie's face, framed by the reflected sunset stutter of
the defective window. [Gibson, 143]

One of the most disturbing facts about Mona's surgery is that it was
not elective. Her change is akin to a degradation ceremony.
"Degradation Ceremony" is a sociological term describing the process of
stripping individual's identity so that it may be replaced by one
suitable for a new environment, such as prison. For example, one's head
is shaved and clothes are replaced so that they may shed their old
identities and assume the identity of "prisoner". The mere existence of
this term attest to the fact that the body accounts for something.
Gibson reflects on what exactly the body does account for when Mona
takes a moment to ponder how her alterations have effected her sense of
identity:

She looked in the mirror. Gerald said he could put it back the way it
was someday, if she wanted him to, but then she wondered how he'd
remember what she'd looked like. Maybe he'd taken a picture or
something. Now that she thought about it, maybe there wasn't anybody
who'd remember how she'd looked before. She guessed Michael's stim deck
was probably the closest bet, but she didn't know his address or even
his last name. It gave her a funny feeling, like who she'd been had
wandered away down the street for a minute and never come back. But the
she closed her eyes and knew she was Mona, always had been, and that
nothing much has changed, anyway not behind her eyelids. [Gibson, 144]

Questions

1. In Neuromancer we are exposed to Case's mentality that the
body is a nuisance. Yet in Count Zero, Herr Virek spends
billions on a quest to gain a functioning body. All three books take
place in a world that seems saturated with a disgusting level of
narcissism in which building "up the nipples with vat-grown erectile
tissue" (143) is completely acceptable. What do you think is Gibson's
ultimate theory about the importance of the human body?

2. What are the differences in Gibson's sentence structure and tone
from when Mona first wakes up in comparison to her later speculations?
What is the purpose of these differences?

3. How does the malfunctioning animation of the beach relate to
Mona's recent surgery?

4. Do you find that in Gibson's novels women seem to be more
obsessed with extreme fashion than men? Is Gibson being sexist?

5. Gibson's mainstream society finds the appearance of infinite
importance yet at the same time technological advances make it seem
that the value of beauty is cheapened. In other words what is the point
of looking like Tally Isham if everyone with enough money can duplicate
that?